Ask HN: What's an inexpensive set-up for learning? I've done a lot of work with microcontrollers, but never FPGAs. Is there a cheap development board with software, that I can try out at home?
[1] http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E...
[2] http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-artix-7-fpga-development-b...
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a bunch of logic gates on a chip, that can be "wired" together in almost arbitrary ways. So in a sense it's more primitive than a MCU. The "field programmable" part is that the wiring pattern is programmed on a desktop computer and fed into the IC. This allows creating combinatorial or sequential logic functions that execute extremely quickly and often in parallel. In addition to simple logic gates, modern FPGA's offer other kinds of "cells" such as memory registers.
Ironically, people have created wiring patterns that implement a complete microprocessor on an FPGA.
This is the extent of my own knowledge, based on product descriptions but no actual experience doing anything with an FPGA.